CoolBeans Open Sourced

07 November 2019

CoolBeans has been open-sourced. The project uses the same simple license as OpenBSD.

CoolBeans fulfilled an important role end of 2018 when people were still waiting on a NetBeans release. It was downloaded massively those first months. The NetBeans April 2019 release gave the world the Java Enterprise modules and this made things a bit calmer.

CoolBeans was also an attempt at creating a lifestyle business which would support more involvement into open-source Apache NetBeans.

Since CoolBeans was thought out as a distribution it switched during development to pkgsrc. The pkgsrc and Java combination is probably unheard of but it made sense for the purpose of the project. The 2019.06 release source tree fits onto a floppy disk but produces an 1GB application!

The closed-source nature of CoolBeans had the role of not to splintering the community. NetBeans was still under incubation in 2018, the author was in the PPMC and didn't want to create a fork. Of course, by being close sourced it was also supposed to encourage companies to buy licenses.

CoolBeans will continue to be maintained in the future.

A ports tree with the existing 3rd party open-source modules has been planned for a long time and having everything in the open might just make it happen sooner.

To celebrate open-sourcing, CoolBeans will be rebranded in the future as OpenBeans and the new site will be www.openbeans.org. The previous brand and website will be active in parallel for a while.

--emi